Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method of combining a plurality of structured documents.
Background Art
Hitherto, at the time of performing printing, duplex printing, layout printing (also called N-up printing) for printing a plurality of pages on a face of a single sheet, or the like has been set as print setting information for saving paper and ink.
However, these items of print setting information are not set over a plurality of print jobs. Therefore, when a plurality of print jobs are generated while designating, for example, duplex printing of a plurality of documents with odd pages, the back face of the last page of a printed matter of each print job becomes a blank page. Thus, there is an issue such that sheet saving cannot be efficiently realized.
In response to this issue, the technique of combining a plurality of print jobs and handling the combined print jobs as a single print job is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-243463. A plurality of print jobs are combined to generate a single combined print job, and duplex printing is set for this combined print job. As a result, for example, when the last page of the first print job included in the combined print job is arranged on the front face of a sheet, the first page of the second print job included in the combined print job can be arranged on the back face of the same sheet.
Also, a printing system different from conventional printing systems has been appearing in recent years. In this new printing system, the XPS format, instead of the conventional EMF format (Enhanced Meta File), is used as a data format stored in a spool file. XPS, which will be described later using FIG. 1, is an electronic document format that is an open standard developed by Microsoft. XPS can have a PrintTicket, which is XML data describing print setting information, for each element such as a page.